American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1932)

December 1932 • American Cinematographer 27 BLEND THEM.... The Scenic and The Commonplace by Elmer Clifton as told to Wilfred Lucas LEARNED a severe lesson in the producing of scenics. A rain had filled the sky with beautiful clouds and we made some interesting views of the clouds. Just for fun we took a shot of some children making mud pies and the mud oozing through their toes. In the final cutting of the picture the two scenes went together so this scene was left in. When the reviewers and the audience entirely ignored the beautiful clouds but went into ecstasies over the mud oozing through the little boy's toes, I realized that nature was a vast subject. It has a myriad of aspects. Too perfect photography and the choice of only dainty bits of scenery do not truly represent Nature. One must show some of the rough seams on the unlined inside of Nature's gown. One must let the audience see the littered gutters, as well as the clean-swept, garnished Sunday streets. He would be a very silly parent who would feed his growing child on fudge and cream puffs exclusively. As Longfellow said "Into each life some rain must fall." So there must be cloud and fog and rain throughout the world. There must be contrasts, because each day of our lives is filled with contrasts, and the photographer who goes out with the finest of lenses and the very latest of filters and mattes and gadgets and brings back just a series of beauty shots, has missed the target altogether. His total effect is one of unreality; for even the lowly toad makes an interesting photographic study in its natural element. Time after time, you will find in the international photo exhibitions, the photographer most likely to win the award is someone who has painstakingly tried to put upon the plate some such subject as a foggy street with a lone silhouette figure as the only suggestion of life. Our cinema public is avid for scenes of travel — foreign or domestic, but, as I said before, not merely the beauty spots. They demand inside information about the people of those places they have never seen — details of their home life, their social intercourse, their peculiar habits. The late Alexander Penrod who photographed with me around the world was a marvel at cooperation. He was just as interested in photographing a grain of dust as he was in making a masterpiece of photographic art of the SweDagon Pogoda. Lew Physioc is another photographer who has an uncanny knack of catching the unusual. He just finished an expedition with George Allen photographing the "Phantom Sea." Mr. Physioc's technique is the use of a great variety of lenses which enable him to present a story from different angles. I recently had occasion to ask Mr. Physioc to make some photographic studies that would fit in with a film taken in 1915. A detail like this to most cinematographers would have been impossible as their minds run in accord with the latest ultra films, soft developments, etc. Mr. Physioc, very cleverly, hunted around until he found raw stock a year old; then he used an old fashioned camera and slow lenses. The result was a perfectly matched picture. The scenes fitted together beautifully. Here is an instance where a man whose vision is guided only by the modern methods would have been unsuccessful. Dr. E. A. Briggs of the University of Sydney, Australia, has made several trips for me into the Jungles of New Guinea, Ceylon, etc. He is a marvel at collecting detail; for he has learned in conducting his classes at the University of Sydney the difficulty of explaining something to an audience. Therefore, he photographs with an explanatory eye. And so your pictures must explain to the cinema public. If they see just a swarming street or a picture of some great temple, no matter how beautifully the scenes may have been photographed, they will get no proper idea of the race who inhabit that street or who worship in that temple, until they have been given intimate, homely pictures of the people and the customs that make those people different from those our public sees in their own daily life. A picture of a little Mongolian boy kicking a dog will Continued on Page 39